Brexit naysayer Guy Verhofstadt, 70, insisted Britain will rejoin the European Union in his lifetime and outlined his vision for an EU “empire” complete with its own fully functioning army.
He also suggested the bloc would increase significantly in size in terms of member states, suggesting their power of veto should be removed in order to allow the centralisation of responsibility for big decisions.
The former Prime Minister of Belgium – well-known for his tirades against the UK’s decision to quit the EU in 2016 – made his remarks in a spirited edition of Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s The Rest is Politics podcast.
Asked by Mr Campbell, Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair’s former director of communications, whether Britain would one day return to the fold, Mr Verhofstadt, now an MP, insisted it would happen within his lifetime.
He said: “Yes, I think so. I think it’s clear. You look at the figures today, you look at what people are saying, I was on the Rejoin march, a few months ago in London, and young people are clearly in favour of returning to the European Union.
“What I hope in the meantime, is that we can change the EU into a better union, because the fact that Britain was exiting the European Union was a failure for the European Union.
“If a big country, an important country, a powerful country like the UK is saying, ‘we leave the EU’, that was a failure for the EU and that is a reason for us to reform ourselves.”
Asked by Mr Stewart to explain what such a failure consisted of, Mr Verhofstadt blamed what he called “a bad governing structure”.
He explained: “It concerns migration, it concerns the pandemic. We are talking about the aftermath of the financial crisis. We can talk about the war in Ukraine. We are acting too little too late.”
He also suggested there needed to be more centralisation when it came to big decisions, saying: “There is no federal structure in Europe, that’s the problem. It’s an intergovernmental patchwork based on unanimity voting. So the 27 member states need to be in agreement.
“Tomorrow there will be 35 or 36 or 37 member states because Moldova will enter Georgia will enter, Ukraine needs to enter for all security and we’re gonna still give a veto to every of these members?
“So what is happening then is that you cannot decide, for example, on sanctions to Russia. It takes always months more for Europe to decide than for the US to decide on this issue. So the main thing to do in Europe, the big reform is to end the veto system that’s in place.”
Outlining his vision for the bloc in 30 years’ time, Mr Verhofstadt called for a scaled-back European Commission and a “serious budget” particularly when it comes to defence.
He said: “I think defence for example, is one of the big scandals in Europe in terms of waste of money.”
Even without the UK members of the EU27 spent roughly £210billion defence, Mr Verhofstadt pointed out.
He stressed: ”We spend the same amount as the Chinese, we spent four times more on defence than the Russians, but we are not capable of defending ourselves.”
Asked by Mr Stewart if he was calling for a European army, Mr Verhofstadt said: “Yes, a European Defence union that I want and that can be the European pillar of NATO, that would make sense.
“You can have a North American pillar, a European pillar and maybe even an Asian pillar in the future with countries like Japan and Australia, New Zealand, but that is the way forward.”
Mr Verhofstadt rejected the characterisation of the EU as a superstate, pointing out that the bloc’s budget consisted of one percent of the GDP of member states.
Nevertheless, he added: “The reality is that in the world of tomorrow, the brutal world of tomorrow, with China, with India, with the US, with Russia that wants to become again an empire, we can only be safe in security when we work together as one big continental organisation.
“I’m sorry, the world of tomorrow is not a wealth of nation states, it’s a world of empires. That is the brutal world of tomorrow.”
